V-LINE EUROPE IN MRO SUPPLY BEST PRACTICES MARKETING ALLIANCE WITH XTIVITY INC

Sehnde, Germany – August 31, 2006 – V-LINE Europe, a world leader in maintenance, repair & operation (MRO) supply announced today at the final gathering of its 4-day annual global sales summit a marketing alliance with Canadian MRO software specialist Xtivity. This alliance will promote the companies complementary services for global, performance driven large plant owner-operators in capital intensive sectors such as metals, chemicals, petroleum, pharmaceuticals and automotive industries.

The market space that V-LINE addresses is Cross Border MRO Procurement Services – the provision of parts and supplies from countries of origin to support a customer-plant’s foreign-made machinery and equipment. Its services move these goods weekly in an accurate, timely and highly cost efficient manor that realizes the best total procurement cost by improving pricing, guaranteeing delivery and automating transactions. XTIVITY’s focus is on plant MRO inventory management and planning. Its Inventory Optimizer (xIOTM) Service analyzes plant transactional inventory data monthly, dynamically calculating Order Points and Order Quantities for all line items in MRO inventory, using a scientific approach with proven statistical methods. This maximizes demand fill rates, lowers total inventory costs and stops future purchases of items that would become obsolete.

“This V-LINE / XTIVITY partnership is an MRO Supply ‘Best Practices’ Marketing Alliance,” said V-LINE CEO Detlev Daues. “For us, it is aimed at our largest and most sophisticated customers, in the Middle East, South America, and Asia. These are companies who are country, regional or world leading producers, performance driven to invest in technology and business processes to stay competitive.  One important part of our role has always been introduction of new best practices to our customers and we see xIOTM in this light,” he said. XTIVITY President John Cowan led a workshop session on xIOTM Service at recent customer deployments to highlight its capability to monitor inventories of many thousands of items and do stocking logic calculations for both frequent-use items and the many infrequently used items that characterize MRO inventory. Results were cited of immediate service level improvements and high single digit percent inventory investment savings. The science behind the web-based service derives from the doctoral work on forecasting at Texas A&M University  by Stephen L. Pearce Ph.D. who is XTIVITY Vice President of Research. According to Cowan, “When xIOTM analyzes our customers Order Points/Order Quantities we consistently see a high investment in ‘Cross Border MRO’ parts. This is usually due to unreliable lead times causing buyers to stock at high levels for security against outages. Making these customers aware of V-LINE’s service with lead time guarantees offers a means to lowering these inventory levels and is a natural for us,” he said.
                  
“Performance driven customers are at the core of this alliance” said V-LINE Logistics Manager Turgey Temur. These are customers measuring on-time and in-specification delivery, who work with us on getting continuous improvement on these metrics from supply chains we manage for them. Like V-LINE and XTIVITY, they share commitment and investment in global best practices technology, processes and collaborative effort,” he said. Attendees and participants at the global summit included two speakers from renowned German and Chinese universities and V-LINE staff and customers from Japan, China, the USA, Mexico, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.

About V-LINE
The V-LINE Group of Companies, headquartered in Sehnde nr Hanover, Germany was founded in l979 to provide capital intensive industrial plants worldwide with a service to reduce the total procurement cost of cross border foreign-made) spare parts. Today, from two buying /warehousing / logistics operations in Japan and the United States, in addition to main operations and administrative hub in Germany, it serves a global customer base of large organizations. For more information, please visit the corporate website at: www.v-line.com or, contact by phone: country code +  5138/7008-0 (DE)  732/493-1400 (US)  66/675-3001(JP) 11 5180 2370 (BR) 10/649-92689 (CN) & 2222/ 536396 (MX)

About Xtivity Inc.
Maintenance Inventory Optimization Services from Xtivity Inc. deliver hard cost savings in 90 days, while improving executive confidence in Operations decision-making. Xtivity's executive team includes experienced leaders in MRO, software development and best practice implementation. The Xtivity Inventory Optimizer (xIO™) is the only service on the market proven to optimize MRO inventories - while offering unparalleled efficiencies and controls in corporate governance at the Operations level. xIO delivers proven results in refining, mining, manufacturing, utilities, food, transportation and automotive industries. More information is found at www.xtivity.com.

top